Now:Zero

Virtual Reality Performance_World VR Forum 2017

Now:Zero Is a virtual reality experience that embraces haptic feedback together with visual experience.

Background

Virtual reality technology allowed people to experience diverse things by changing the perspective, yet, it highly depends on visual/auditive information inside of the headset. A team in MA Interaction design discussed how to design VR experience that could overcome the limitation of the current VR technology. Plus, giving insights to the audience about VR technology, such as what are the limitations, how it tricks us to generate emotion. As a result, we created a story that contains haptic experiences inside of the VR experience.

Design Goal

The critical point of this project was matching haptic feedback with storyline inside of VR experiences. For the natural interaction, the whole plot needed to embrace prop usage, the choreography of performer, Unity program. Plus, each member had to learn VR development process from scratch to develop the experience, as this project was the first VR project for every of team members.

Moving steps in virtual reality. One needs to step on it to proceed VR experience.

Physical steps are synced with scenes in VR story

Virtual ball to open a door. Leap motion tracks hand and triggers a digital probe.

Design Solution

We created a story that will generate the fear of height. The main character(user) challenges stepping in the air to another step. These steps are the physical steps, and the performers change the arrangement of it following the storyline. At the end of the experience, after taking off the headset, people realize those physical steps were only a few centimeters high. In this way, we communicated how our sense could be tricked merely by the visual material in VR technology.

Color tone sketch for virtual probes.

When users eat marshmallow(digital probe and also the real), the scale of user shrinks.